How to do a website accessibility audit

Published September 11, 2026 · about a 7-minute read

You typed "website accessibility audit" into Google, clicked a few vendors, and got quotes ranging from $1,500 to $50,000. That spread isn't a scam — it's the tell that "audit" means very different things depending on who's selling it. Before you pay anyone, it helps to know exactly what an audit is, how much of it you can do yourself, and where a human is genuinely worth the money.

I've run these both ways — DIY on my own sites and paying specialists for client work. Here's the honest breakdown.

What an accessibility audit actually is

An accessibility audit is a structured check of your site against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) — currently 2.2 at Level AA for most purposes — to find the things that block people with disabilities from using it. Missing alt text, color contrast that's too low, forms a screen reader can't announce, a checkout you can't finish with a keyboard. A real audit ends with a report: each issue, where it is, which WCAG criterion it fails, and how to fix it.

That report is the deliverable. It's what a lawyer wants to see, what a procurement team asks for, and what your dev team works from. If a "quick scan" doesn't produce a mapped, actionable list, it isn't an audit — it's a teaser.

The two layers, and why you need both

Every credible audit has two parts, and this is where the price ranges come from.

Automated testing runs a scanner against your pages and flags machine-detectable failures fast — missing alt attributes, empty links, unlabeled form fields, low contrast. A tool can sweep thousands of pages in minutes. It's cheap, repeatable, and great for the obvious stuff.

Manual testing is a human using a keyboard and a screen reader, working through real tasks. This is what catches the problems a machine can't reason about: a keyboard trap in a modal, a reading order that jumps around, alt text that exists but describes the wrong thing, a custom dropdown that looks fine and announces nothing.

Here's the number that settles the "can't I just run a tool?" question. In a January 2026 study, the most capable AI-powered testing tool detected about 62.8% of the issues a manual audit found; a common open-source scanner (axe-core) found about 22.6%. So even the best automation misses a third or more of real issues, and a typical free scanner misses roughly three-quarters. Automation is a starting line, not a finish line.

Automated tools tell you what's definitely broken. They can't tell you it's usable. Only a person driving the page with assistive tech can do that.

What it costs

Ballpark, so you can sanity-check quotes:

Remediation — actually fixing what the audit finds — is usually a separate cost, often larger than the audit itself. Anyone quoting you a flat "make me compliant for $99" is selling an overlay widget, which doesn't fix the underlying code and won't hold up.

The DIY-first path (do this before you pay anyone)

You can knock out a real chunk of an audit yourself, for free, and it makes any paid audit cheaper because the easy issues are already gone:

1. Run an automated scan on your key templates — home, a product/service page, checkout, contact. Fix everything it flags: contrast, alt text, labels, page language. This is the fast third.
2. Do a keyboard-only pass. Unplug the mouse. Tab through each page. Can you reach and operate every menu, control, and the checkout? Can you always see where focus is? Can you get out of every component?
3. Do a screen-reader pass. Turn on VoiceOver (Mac) or NVDA (Windows, free) and try to complete your main task with your eyes closed-ish. You'll hear the broken bits immediately.
4. Map what's left against the WCAG 2.2 AA checklist. What you can't fix or can't judge is exactly what a paid manual audit is worth paying for.

Do those four and you've covered more ground than most "audits" priced under a grand. For the legal picture behind all this — who gets sued and to what standard — see the ADA compliance guide.

The part audits miss: it doesn't stay fixed

A one-time audit is a photo, and your site is a video. Every deploy, every new marketing page, every plugin update can reintroduce a failure the audit cleared. I've watched a site pass in one month and fail the next after a redesign nobody checked. The automated layer is the part you should run continuously, so regressions surface the week they happen instead of the week a demand letter arrives.

That's the gap our free accessibility checker fills — it runs the machine-detectable checks against your live page and grades it, any time, no signup. Start there, fix what it finds, then bring in a human for the manual layer.